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Monitor database health in a dashboard

When someone reports that a database query failed or is too slow, several questions come
to mind. Finding the answers can be a time-consuming endeavour. You might spend hours combing the
logs of database instances just to narrow down where the issue began.

With the ExtraHop platform, metrics about every database transaction on your network are
located in one place. A dashboard in the ExtraHop system offers a central location for exploring
this information and building helpful charts.

Dashboards are flexible and customizable, letting you build several types of charts that reveal
different types of database metrics, which can shed light on underlying causes of database
issues.

This walkthrough shows you how to build charts with the Metric Explorer and develop a dashboard
to analyze database metrics. By modifying charts and selecting different metrics, you can explore
data that brings you closer to the answers for the following questions:

How many database errors do I have?

When did the errors occur?

What is the percentage of database errors on my network?

Which servers are sending database errors?

What are the slowest database instances?

Prerequisites

You must have access to an ExtraHop Discover appliance with a user account that has limited
or full write privileges.

Familiarize yourself with the concepts in this walkthrough by reading the Dashboards topic.

If you do not have access to database server data or the required privileges for the Discover
appliance, you can perform this walkthrough in the ExtraHop demo.

Create a dashboard

When you first log into the ExtraHop Web UI, you see a dashboard called the Activity
dashboard. To create your own dashboard to display database metrics, complete the following
steps.

On the bottom left of the Dashboard page, click New
Dashboard.

In the Title field of Dashboard Properties, type a name for your dashboard. For
this walkthrough, type Database Health.

Click Create. When you create a new dashboard, a
workspace opens in an editable layout mode. This workspace contains a single
region and two empty widgets: a chart and a text box.

Text box widgets can include custom explanatory text about a dashboard or
chart. For this walkthrough, however, we won’t be adding text. Delete the text
box by completing the following steps:

Click the command menu in the upper right corner of the text box
widget and select Delete.

Click Delete Widget.

Next steps

Let’s add database error metrics to the empty chart.

How many errors do I have?

These steps show you how to create a chart to display the number of database errors
for a specified time interval.

Database errors are a general indicator of the stability and health of an
application. In the ExtraHop system, database errors are the number of request
operations that failed on all database instances. Any database error should be
investigated.

To build the dashboard charts in this walkthrough, you’ll select the All Activity
application as the source. All Activity is a metric source that is available by
default to all users and contains metrics about all of the devices discovered on
your network.

Click the empty chart widget in your newly created dashboard to open the Metric
Explorer.

Click Add Source.

In the Sources field, type All Activity to filter the
results, and then select All Activity.

If you are building your dashboard in the Command appliance, select an
All Activity application for a connected Discover appliance.

In the Metrics field, type database errors to filter
results from all of the available metrics, and then select Database
Errors.

From the bottom of the window, click the Value
chart.

Click Save.

Tip:

You can add a sparkline to your Value chart, which shows you
how the number of errors changed over time. Click the
Options tab at the top of the left pane and then
select Include sparklines.

When did the errors occur?

Now that you have determined the scope of database errors, let’s take a look at when
the errors occurred and how they changed over time.

Click and drag a new chart widget from the bottom of the page into an empty
space on the region. If there is overlap, dashboard components are outlined in
red, and you must click and drag the sides of the widgets and regions to make
room.

Click the chart.

Click Add Source and select All
Activity.

In the Metrics field, click Any Protocol and select
Database. This shortcut helps narrow down your search
for metrics by protocol.

Type errors to filter results and then select
Database Errors.

From the bottom of the page, click the Line chart.

Click Save.

Next steps

Let’s continue to add more database error charts to reveal a bigger picture about
database errors on your network.

What is the percentage of errors happening on my network?

Comparing the number of database errors to the number of database transactions
(requests and responses) can help you gauge the scope of issues on your network.

From the bottom of the page, click and drag a chart widget into the empty
space.

From the bottom of the page, click the Bar chart. You
can now calculate the ratio of errors to transactions.

Click Save.

Next steps

You now have three charts that help you visualize the health of databases in your
network. Next, let’s add charts that help you drill into the cause of database
errors.

Which operations methods are causing the errors?

Methods describe database operations. Uncovering the methods associated with database
errors can help you determine the type of instance related to the database errors. If an
operation is called against a table, the table name is displayed after an @
symbol.

From the bottom of the page, click and drag a chart widget into the empty
space.

In the same chart you are editing, click Drill down by
<None> from the Details section and select
Methods. In a dashboard, you can drill down on a
top-level metric, such as database errors, and view up to 20 of the methods that
contributed to the overall number of database errors on your network.

Click Save.

Next steps

You now have a chart that helps you track database errors to specific operations.
Next, let’s track a metric about database performance.

Evaluate server processing times by server

Let’s explore the performance of database instances by looking at the server
processing time metric. In the ExtraHop system, server processing time is calculated as the
time it takes the server to send the first packet of a response after receiving the last
packet of a request. High server processing time can indicate resource
contention.

Before adding a processing time chart to your dashboard, let’s first add another
region to the dashboard to organize the charts into logical groups.

On one of the charts, click the command menu in the upper right
corner.

Hover over Copy to… and select the name of your
dashboard from the menu. The most recently created dashboards are listed at the
bottom of the flyout menu. This step creates a copy of the chart in a new
region.

In the new region, click Rename. Type
Database Performance and then click
Save.

Click the chart.

Click the x icon next to the current metric and drill
down selections.

Click Add metrics and then select Database
Server Processing Time.

Click Mean and then select
Maximum.

At the bottom of the window, click the Value chart. This
value represents the slowest time a database instance took to process a query
and prepare the response.

Add a new chart to the Database Performance region. From the bottom of the
page, drag and drop a chart widget into an empty area.

Click the chart title and select Rename. Type
Processing Time by Server in the custom name field
and then click Save.

In the Details section, click Drill down by <None>
and then select Server.

Note:

To display more servers, type a larger number into the Top results
field. You can view up to 20 drill-down items in a dashboard
chart.

Click Save.

At the upper right corner of the dashboard page, click Exit Layout
Mode.

Next steps

Your dashboard is complete! You can now monitor the general health of database
transactions on your network. The following sections offer additional tips for analyzing
database metrics from your dashboard.

Compare different time intervals

By applying a delta comparison of time intervals to your charts, you can see changes
in data from two time intervals side-by-side.

Click the region header and select Use Region Time
Selector.

In the region header, click Last 30 Minutes.

Near the bottom of the time interval window, click
Compare. You can now select two intervals to perform
a delta comparison of metrics from each time period. For this example, let’s
compare metrics from yesterday to the last 30 minutes.

Click Save. You will now see the delta comparison of
metrics in all charts within the region.

Note:

You can perform a delta comparison for the entire dashboard by
changing the global time interval. The global time interval is located at
the top left corner of the dashboard page.

To remove the delta comparison, click Last 30 minutes vs 1 day
ago in the region header, click Remove
Delta, and then click Save.

Additional database metrics to monitor

Database errors and server processing time are a couple of sources of information about
the health of database traffic. Here are suggestions for other metrics that you can add to your
dashboard to answer the following questions.

Question

Database metric

Database metrics to add to your dashboard

Who is connecting to a database instance?

Database Requests, drill down by User

The ExtraHop system tracks who creates a session (connection) with a database
server instance. A database user is determined during the negotiation phase of a
connection to a database instance. In the ExtraHop system, database users are listed
by login name, or as anonymous, unknown, and pre-login.